View studio visit #1 with Elisa Lendvay https://vimeo.com/33352340View studio visit #2 with Elisa Lendvay https://vimeo.com/194305148My artistic process is multifaceted as I work in different series that include floor, wall, table top sculptures, drawings and shaped paintings of experimental materials. The forms and content are explored in different ways but are related to the same search and personal vision, tied to dreams and the mystic beauty in the day to day, including decay. Many of my recent pieces are “collections”, found fragments from specific landscapes in nature and the city, like shaped driftwood, bits of plastic and metal, and handmade forms of materials like papier mache, clay, wax or plaster with paint. I often find certain sizes of chipped plastic parts or flattened metal strips that have been run over. There are criteria for forms that I want to respond to and transform further. There might be a flattened curved black shape that has remaining bits of color, which I can emulate in repeated forms, like an echo of the original that is already something different than what it was. These parts have histories and my process with them is like strata, tracking of time, extension of the moment. They are carefully placed, connected and suspended on structures of steel or other materials, to read like sentences with implied cosmologies, bits of information orbiting around based on color, shapes and relationships. In addition, there is a system of forms in my sculptures and drawings developing and becoming a personal and formal iconography of symbols. They point to an implied narrative in addition to being about space, the body in space, line and color on form, or converging forms. These coexist with the assemblages and meld into works, perhaps serving in the translation of the work as a whole. Drawing and gouache on paper is essential to my practice as a way of recording. It’s a way I figure out forms and thoughts. The drawings are always purest in a spontaneous way of drawing small inventories of form and variations of sculptures I have made and wanting to make. I’m continually trying to capture and depict these drawn forms on a larger scale and back again in the sculpture. The works arrive out of a haptic sensibility and are made with a variety of combined and often found materials. In them I want to posit forms that lyricize the internal dynamics of a given space, moment, or place – its instances of fragmentation and unity, fragility and resilience. As composite structures the pieces are gestural, animated and sometimes suspended. I am trying to elucidate movement and capture corporeal motion - forms on the verge of collapse or convergence within a specified space or landscape. The impulse is to visualize thoughts and forms in ways that offer different ways of seeing and relating to the body, time, memory, and perception. I am emphasizing the element of time with the accumulation of matter and overlaying of material and form as a layering of time, thought, and memory. The form, reiterated, repeated, becomes a sequence that highlights something that has shifted. “Lendvay's hand melds into her creations, blurring the line between the synthetic and the pre-existing, fabricating objects that tread the boundary between our memory and hers. The artist's psychological excavation and manipulation of the phantasmagoric creates a skewed archeological repository that forges a nexus between history, memory, and matter, projecting a latent spectacle of our collective unconscious and distorted archetypes.” Holly Jarret, curator of "About a Mountain", Asya Geisberg Gallery, Summer 2014

About Elisa Lendvay

The work of Elisa Lendvay starts on the way to the studio, where she accumulates the objects that make up her sculptures. She transforms these found objects with paint or by combining them with materials like plaster, papier-mâché, and wire, creating microcosmic works that look as though they were washed up on a beach or bleached by the sun. Her work explores the relationship between painting and sculpture, and much of it walks the line between the two mediums, whether through the use of paint to emphasize line and form in the style of Jean Dubuffet, or in three-dimensional paintings with layers of built-up details that protrude from the wall. “I’m interested in rendering movement and a sort of energy in different ways of working and thinking with the hands,” Lendvay has said of her multifaceted practice.